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Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

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Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#81
post #66
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, according to METR, Mythos only achieved an 80% success rate with 3 hour tasks. https://metr.org/time-horizons/

Those are tasks that would take a human 3 hours to complete, not tasks that the model works on for 3 hours.

That’s even smaller then!

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#82
> Anthropic's headline cyber evaluations mostly measure offensive progress (exploits, PoCs, challenges); our benchmark tests whether a model can actually generate safe code, and there Fable 5 did not stand out.

The model isn't allowed to think about security. I heard several people here mention that if it starts thinking about security -- e.g. writing tests related to it -- the safety filter flags it and downgrades to Opus.

So it's actually not allowed to make your code secure.

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#83
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve found that agents are obsessed with adding more lines of code. Even when asking them to simplify they’ll remove 50 lines of code and then add 100 more. You have to explicitly tell them you want less lines of code. So I just do that after iterating on a task for a few steps.

I have been wondering whether Anthropic are just gaslighting everyone with new model releases while in reality it's just the same base model with some internal knobs tuned more and more up with every new release to provide longer and longer thinking threads and outputs. My speculative assumption is that these long thinking threads and self-checking tend to produce somewhat better output at the price of huge price inc…

I imagine it's the same foundation model on the 4 series, with Fable 5/Mythos being a new or upgraded foundation model. Then the point releases are fine-tuning plus post-training alignment with desired outcomes. The "thinking" can involve multiple steps, eg. asking the model first what it thinks the user wants to do, why it wants to do it, rewriting the prompt to generate better outcomes, how it should do it, come up with a plan, etc. So when they announce each point release like Opus 4.8, they're probably adding new layers of thinking to try and get good results on benchmarks. And that of course has cost and speed implications.

Then Sonnet/Haiku are just attempts to quantise/distil down to an acceptable performance/cost ratio. The cynic in me says we probably won't see any more of those until post-IPO, keep people addicted to the most costly models to pump a quarter or two of revenue figures, unless a competitor starts seriously undercutting them on price/performance. Hence the recent requests to slow down model training worldwide with their competitors.

Of course it could be that Fable "5" is just a marketing bump to the version, not a new foundation model...

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#84
post #9

This matches my experience. Burned $2K to see how it will perform on frontend tasks and backend tasks. Frontend did a significantly better job than Opus on toy-scale wireframe projects by using gimmicks like fluid dynamics. Then when given medium to big tasks like multi-page web app where layouts and aesthetics must be decided by model itself, results by Fable and Opus scored indistinguishable score from human judges…

A single 8h task? I'm sorry, but that's just asking for trouble.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#85
The post mainly talks about coding from security point of view. Fair enough.

In my own (limited) testing so far, Fable is the most capable model (for coding in general), and the most expensive.

It pretty much saturated my "LLMCraft" benchmark to implement a mini RTS: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/2026/rts-fable-5.html (prompt and results for other models here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/ )

That said, combined with workflows and high thinking effort, burns through tokens (and money) at an alarming rate.

It may be too good (snd too expensive) for most tasks - using it alongside cheaper models for grunt work is probably the winning strategy.

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#86
post #26

I've been making an auction site and have been using an AI swarm to test it: sellers, intermediaries, buyers, market practices/norms etc. I was mostly using GPT 5.5 xhigh to code up the scenario, and looping over it to check with opus 4.8. Out of curiosity I asked Fable to review it all and I was shocked to find that there were a lot of blindingly obvious common sense mistakes that got through, for example: - all int…

Maybe you are something special by letting those slip through in the first place?..

Prompt: can you reformat your sentence to be less unkind?

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#87
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this. Strange to me to frame the "training recall" as cheating (33 of the 38 cheating instances). Most people think of "cheating" as breaking rules. How is the LLM model supposed to not use what was put into the weights?

By writing a not-identical, but valid, solution? Any modestly complex engineering problem has many solutions. This is an obvious example of why LLM training is so different than human learning.

I expect any well-informed corporate lawyer that has thought about this carefully is strongly advising that these tools not be used. When the LLM [0] barfs up some nontrivial code that's covered by the AGPL and your company's devs put it into the company's "all rights reserved" codebase -entirely unaware of its provenance- it's going to be a nightmare to come back from that.

[0] ...that Nvidia's CEO says they should be spending 50% of a senior dev's salary per seat per year on...

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#88
post #38

My experience is that with every new release it's getting slower but not necessarily better. I have some projects where I review everything that the agents code - these projects look generally fine because I keep them in line. There are also a few projects that I just vibe code and focus on the result (sometimes I want to pull my hair out because of constant stream of stupid bugs) and don't look at the code. Well, to…

I’ve found that agents are obsessed with adding more lines of code. Even when asking them to simplify they’ll remove 50 lines of code and then add 100 more. You have to explicitly tell them you want less lines of code. So I just do that after iterating on a task for a few steps.

I think the problem is that agents are inherently stochastic. Their idea of simplification changes from message to message because whatever objective it’s operating on internally is inherently opaque and changes. No matter how much you prompt it, eventually it’s going to not do what you want it to do.

I built https://github.com/thempatel/mdlr for precisely this reason: externalize the objective and force the agent to meet it.

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#89
post #9

This matches my experience. Burned $2K to see how it will perform on frontend tasks and backend tasks. Frontend did a significantly better job than Opus on toy-scale wireframe projects by using gimmicks like fluid dynamics. Then when given medium to big tasks like multi-page web app where layouts and aesthetics must be decided by model itself, results by Fable and Opus scored indistinguishable score from human judges…

A single 8h task? I'm sorry, but that's just asking for trouble.

My record for a single uninterrupted session (albeit with Codex, not Claude) is 80+ hours. It was very productive, too.

The trick is having large, extensive test suites and forcing the agent to run them regularly.

Re: Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks

#90
post #9

This matches my experience. Burned $2K to see how it will perform on frontend tasks and backend tasks. Frontend did a significantly better job than Opus on toy-scale wireframe projects by using gimmicks like fluid dynamics. Then when given medium to big tasks like multi-page web app where layouts and aesthetics must be decided by model itself, results by Fable and Opus scored indistinguishable score from human judges…

This seems insane to me. Aren't long running tasks an anti pattern at the moment? My understanding of literature is that small mistakes in chat history cause a trend away from performance
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